Sunday, November 20, 2005

Poets' Corner on A Sunday Morning

Yehuda Amichai*Czeslaw Milosz*Joseph Brodsky*Seamus Heaney

*

Hike with a Woman

When after hours of walking

You suddenly discover That the body of the woman striding beside you Is not made for A march of war, That her thighs grow heavy And her buttocks move like a tired flock You are filled with great joy For the world Where women are like this."

---Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000 ), translated by Harold Schimmel

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Falling in Love

"Tomber amourex. To fall in love. Does it occur suddenly or gradually ? If gradually, when is the moment "already" ? I would fall in love with a monkey made of rags. With a plywood squirrel. With a botanical atlas. With an oriole. With a ferret. With a marten in a picture. With the forest one sees to the right when riding in a cart to Jaszuny. With a poem by a little-known poet. With human beings whose names still move me. And always the object of love was enveloped in erotic fantasy or was submitted, as in Stendhal, to a "cristallisation", so it is frightful to think of that object as it was, naked among the naked things, and of the fairy tales about it one invents. Yes, I was often in love with something or someone. Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love. That is something different."

---Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), translated from Polish by the author and Robert Haas

***

New Life

"In the new life, a cloud is better than the bright sun. The rain akin to self-knowledge, appears perpetual. On the other hand, an unexpected train You don't wait for alone on a platform arrives on schedule. A sail is passing its judgment on the horizon's lie. The eye tracks the sinking soap, though it's the foam that is famous. And should anyone ask you "Who are you ?", you reply "Who--I ? I am nobody", as Ulysses once muttered to Polyphemus."

--Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996)

Song

"A rowan like a lipsticked girl.Between the by-road and the main roadAlder trees at a wet and dripping distanceStand off among the rushes.There are the mud-flowers of dialectAnd the immortelles of perfect pitchAnd that moment when the bird sings very closeTo the music of what happens."